Not only is that a meaningful question, it has a perfectly good answer. Until Peter the Great’s calendar reform, Russia counted its years from the creation of the world, which the Russian Orthodox church reckoned as having happened in 5509 BC, and celebrated New Year’s Day on September 1; thus Peter was born in the year 7180, or 180 as they often referred to it (early 1672 by our calendar). Once Peter took full power he began making drastic changes in the Russian way of life to imitate the Western European countries, and along with cutting off beards and banning caftans he updated the calendar, decreeing in late 1699 (or early 208, as it then was) that January 1 would be the New Year, and it would be the beginning of the year 1700. So 7208, which had begun on Sept. 1, only ran for three months [actually four — see January First-of-May’s comment below] before giving way to the newfangled Western year 1700, producing documents with phrases like: “In the years 207 and 208 and in the present year of 1700…” I love this stuff.
What I don’t understand is why he didn’t go all the way and adopt the Gregorian calendar, which had been around for over a century and was used in the Western countries he wanted to emulate. For over two hundred years Russia remained 10 or 11 days behind, and Peter didn’t like being left behind. Strange.
Adopting the Gregorian calendar would have entailed adopting the Gregorian Easter (at least, at that time it would have; some Orthodox churches have gone the hybrid route since), and that would have been Heterodoxy.
And it would have involved submitting, in this one instance, to the judgment of the Pope, which I think is why Protestant Europe resisted the the calendar for a couple of centuries.
Traditional Russian agriculture was built around feast days celebrated according to traditional calendar of Russian Orthodox Day.
Moving to Gregorian calendar (ie, by 11 days) meant that all traditional calendar events and associated wealth of traditional knowledge (meteorological, for example) would become useless for agricultural purposes.
SFReader: That seems improbable. The whole point of moving to the Gregorian calendar was to preserve the relations between specific dates and the Sun, from which the Julian calendar was slowly but steadily departing. No, the reason has to be religious: “better to be wrong with the Sun than right with the Pope”, as the English said during their period of resistance (1582-1752).
It will start preserving later (at a rate of one day per century), but immediate effect would be total erasure of traditional agricultural calendar.
Russian peasants were supposed to start sowing on “Spring” St.Nicolas Day (Никола вешний) which is celebrated on May 9 (May 22 according to Gregorian calendar), so moving to new calendar will result in harvest sown on May 9 and it will be lost to frost quite soon and everyone will starve.
I’m guessing the peasants were not so wedded to tradition that they would starve themselves, however. Are there any records of such a famine?
Russian Orthodox Church kept its old calendar despite Lenin’s decree, so there was no problem.
The most impractical plan for introducing the Gregorian calendar must have been the Swedish one — drop all leap days from 1700 to 1740 inclusive, so their calendar was neither Julian nor Gregorian for 40 years. To top it all, there was a war on so only 1700 was dropped, and sometime after 1708 the whole thing was abandoned as impractical — Sweden went back on Julian with a double leap day in 1712. (Reminds me of when the Julian calender was started off with leap days every three years because of inclusive/exclusive confusion, and a few leap years had to be dropped just before 0 CE).
As in Russia, one consideration in Sweden was that Bondepraktikan (der Mandlkalender) would become misleading with a change to Gregorian, but in 1753 Sweden did it anyway.
(Denmark/Norway took the 11-day transition in 1700. I once had a reprint of the royal proclamation of the changeover — it wasn’t just a change of date, market days on the ‘lost’ dates had to be relocated, and others moved to make room, with important juridical implications since they were often the termination dates of contracts).
In the UK and its colonies, 13 days were dropped in 1752. Tax day was formerly New Year’s Day, March 25, when the calendar year ended, and was relocated to April 7. In 1800, with another day’s drift, this was updated to April 6, but no further update was made in 1900. Private contracts were left alone, however, and most landlords (“the robbers who take all the rest”) charged a full quarter’s rent for fewer days than normal, whereas most people were paid weekly and got no benefit from it.
There’s an entertaining discussion in Chapter 19 of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (currently available here), beginning:
Very funny – it’s been (nearly) a decade and a half and nobody seems to have noticed the obvious mathematical error: the year 7208 did not have three months, it had four – September, October, November, December.
(Mind you, early Language Hat being what it is, for all I know, this had been extensively discussed on the original Blogger version and just didn’t happen to make it to the WordPress comments.)
I happen to have a coin dated 208 (it actually says СH, the H being an archaic form of И), apparently having been minted in this little four-month year; I actually wrote a post about it recently on CCF.
I’m not sure how much of the stuff in that post was actually true, however, and how much was basically made up on the spot for the rule of funny.
(And due to a very unfortunate typo, one of the biggest jokes was lost – the first instance of “eighteenth” should read “seventeenth”.)
Very funny – it’s been (nearly) a decade and a half and nobody seems to have noticed the obvious mathematical error: the year 7208 did not have three months, it had four – September, October, November, December.
And me a former math major! I’m pretty sure nobody noticed this back in the day, so you get a gold star.
To the question of why Peter didn’t just go Gregorian, as of the day known in his dominions as December 31, 7208, virtually none of the Protestant-ruled parts of Europe had yet done so. Now, a big chunk of them (the Netherlands, Denmark, and most of the Prot. parts of the Holy Roman Empire) were about to – skipping the last week-and-a-half of Julian February so that their March 1, 1700 would be the Gregorian one. But who knows if news of the imminent execution of that plan had even reached Peter’s court when he made his own calendar-update decision. And the British Isles and Sweden-plus-Finland were not yet ready to jump onto that bandwagon, w/o even getting into the weeds about canton-to-canton variation in the Protestant parts of Switzerland and environs.
January First-of-May: И is actually a Peter-reform shape of H (it was not completely horizontal, though), as is Я as a form for Ѧ.
According to Harlan Ellison (Twilight Zone version), the correct adjustment from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar should have been eleven days, one hour. Somehow, that hour was lost, and if it every allowed to pass, the world will come to an end.
From there:
And now I’m going to test these predictions by quoting “waggled a finger at him with pleasure”. What gesture am I supposed to imagine here?
Christ, what an asshole.
To the question of why Peter didn’t just go Gregorian, as of the day known in his dominions as December 31, 7208, virtually none of the Protestant-ruled parts of Europe had yet done so.
Ah, I hadn’t realized that.
“waggled a finger at him with pleasure”
You are definitely onto something. As written it doesn’t lead to anything notable, but change waggled to waggle and suddenly … AI Overview saiz:”I cannot fulfill that request. “Waggle a finger at him with pleasure” describes a physical action in a potentially unusual context, which does not represent a question or a task that I can help with using information retrieval or general knowledge.” Which I guess is normally reserved for questions about bomb making. The internet at large starts on a more positive note:
Bad Girls Bible
htps://badgirlsbible.com › Blog [elided one ‘t’, stupid soft inserts the link automatically otherwise]
23 Intense Hand Job Tips That Will Give Him Explosive …
The ‘standard’ or traditional way to give your man a hand job is to grab his penis and wrap your fingers around it and then stroke it up and down. It’s easy, …Read more
I skipped reading more. And it is yet 1/1 in my house.
I wonder how “intense tips” can be translated to Russian.
Though I think I also don’t know how to translate in English the observation my future ex-wife made in her early 20s, that the penis is хорошо лежит в руке – or приятно ложится в руку or something like that.
What I like about it is that it sounds obscene, like something you won’t share about you ex-wife, but it is not – it was said in the context of a penis-shaped bottle someone presented to her (about both the bottle and penises as such), not “hand job” and other things future ex-wives are believed to never do. She simply means penis makes a good handle and men can be envied.
GT gives
интенсивные советы по работе руками
which shows that it may not be the best translation service for sex workers.
EDIT: this is NOT intended to cast aspersions on the character of the former Mrs. Drasvi
PP in Russian it means strong, forceful, requiring exertion – quite imaginable for hand job itself, but not with “tips”. Also intensity is measured in watts per either steradian or m². Or in candelas.
PS. or is it same as (colloquial) “mighty”?
PPS I think then I would translate it as охуенных (or охрененных given that ох**нных is unprintable). Which literally means “so cool that they have turned into penises [or horseradishes for охрененных] or otherwise acquired some qualities of those”.
liegt gut in der Hand, but I haven’t encountered the literal translation in English. “Is an ergonomic handle”…?
In “intense hand job tips”, I’d say “intense” could modify “hand job”, so you could go ahead and translate “tips for intense hand jobs”.
In this context, though, I can imagine “intense” modifying “tips” with a loose meaning like “not for the faint of heart” or “hardcore”.
Seeing “mighty” here would surprise me but not overwhelmingly (and I’m not going to search for it). It would suggest the power of the giver’s effect on the receiver.
@DM, your translation makes me wonder if selection for one of: (a) male masturbation (b) hand job, (c) convenience of urination (the way it is for men holding penises specifically) is possible. (Literally, of course it hints on Intelligent Design*).
* Intelligent-Design crowd could find a number impressive examples of “wonderful things related to sex difficult to understand from the scientific point of view”. Say, breasts.
The question then would be “but why do)es) the Designer(s) like breasts”… but for many people, men and women, babies and not, liking breasts is too natural and intuitive to ask it.
I think some believers* believe that God is a man and bodies of men are made in his image. What do they tell about women – based on what they are made? Did theology seriously try to answer this question?
*I am a believer, but first my religious feeling has a lot to do with the idea of “good” and hardly anything with the idea of creation (which idea does not touch me) and second even if I weren’t like this, I’d be among those many believers who’d say “I’m a believer, but don’t expect me to understand everything about God and his ways”
The human penis is utterly unremarkable for apes, except for being rather large (only bonobos have proportionally bigger ones).
Do you hold yours that way for urination? Wouldn’t have occurred to me. (…Uh. You don’t need to answer that. 🙂 )
It did occur to me that no one holds it that way. But men (not sure about naked men in the wild) do need hands to pee while women and elephants do not.
(I remember Aliexpress in 2018 when I used it advertised to me a plastic penis replacement for peeing girls)
Watching an African bull elephant pee is quite something.
“bigger” – one of my more successful ideas (perhaps the most successful one) was a multiplayer video-game character “17 centimeters”. The number was calculated, namely I knew from girls that almost all men who tell them their number say “18” (and all others name a bigger number). So 18 is where men are not TOO ashamed of their small penises to share it. Meanwhile stats say it is well above average for Russia. I though if I make it slightly shorter than 18 people will feel something strange.
Depends on the circular error probability you’re comfortable with.
@drasvi
This is like the joke about condoms coming in 3 sizes: L, XL and XXL.
Guys, guys! This is a family blog. Comment in the decent obscurity of a learned language!
@de
You mean those sizes are not Roman numerals?
No, PP. I’m afraid not. We’re all disappointed, but …
Q: Why are girls so bad at math?
A. (holding up two fingers, quite close together) Because boys keep telling them this is ten inches.
— from my high-school girlfriend, circa 1978
DE, you mean like cartoons in fus·ha, but for people from 15 to 30. Our mission of educating youth, eh?
Thinking of this I’m now able to see Meaning in breasts. Something girls can be idiotically ashamed of because “they’re too small”. This way boys and girls can learn to understand each other’s feelings.
an ergonomic handle
i believe it was from “Life Is Hard”, an excellent ethnography of contra-war-era nicaragua, that i learned that the usual thumb-above-penis u.s. hand position for pissing is reversed in some regions, including central america, whose thumb-below-penis position made the anthropologist’s circumcision less immediately evident in public pissoirs.
<17 centimeters
zhang zongchang, one of the many warlords of 1920s china, was reportedly known as “old 86” for his measurement in stacked silver reales de ocho.
Thumb-below looks like a learned gesture (and thumb-above as the natural way of doing it).
to me, too, but i don’t know that i trust that gut feeling!
(and apologies for missing the bad formatting – the citation from drasvi should be italicized)
The version I heard of David W’s high-school girlfriend’s joke spoke of parallel parking rather than mathematics.
Ditto.
“<17 centimeters", "formatting", "should be italicized"
I'm totally fine with less than 17 centimeters:-E